Revisiting Zac Efron's 2004 Lifetime Movie

Like all good actors starting from nothing in the nightmare that is Hollywood, Zac Efron once starred in a Lifetime movie. And not a cool Lifetime movie like the ones of today, that are about people like Aaliyah and Lizzie Borden, but one of the old-school Lifetime movies. The ones that are always about teen girls falling in with dangerous older men, or moms trying to make ends meet as hardships fly at them from every direction, with titles like On the Edge of Innocence. Zac Efron's Lifetime movie is that kind of Lifetime movie.

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I watched Miracle Run this week to see Zac as a little tadpole in anticipation of Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, which finds him transformed into the muscle-bound frog he was always meant to be. I did not expect to like it, nor did I expect to be impressed by his acting, but as I learned while watching all three High School Musical movies in one weekend, I should never, ever underestimate Zac Efron.

In Miracle Run, Zac plays Stephen Morgan, an autistic high-school student who dreams of joining the cross-country team and getting as swole as Rocky Balboa. This being a Lifetime movie, though, the script goes all the way back to the moment Stephen's mom (Mary-Louise Parker) first finds out that he and his twin brother Phillip are autistic, so Zac doesn't appear for the first 35 minutes. Do not skip these 35 minutes, however, because if you do, you will later be confused as to why Mary-Louise is rejecting the advances of the kind but badly dressed handyman played by Aidan Quinn. (Just kidding, you won't. It's obviously because she's been abandoned too many times before!)

When the movie starts, Mary-Louise initially thinks that Stephen and Philip don't talk much because they speak in a weird twin language only they understand, but she soon finds a doctor to explain that they're autistic. Her boyfriend immediately dumps her, at which point she must find both a job and a decent adult to care for her children while she's at work. She also gets help from a tutor who devises Stephen and Phillip-specific methods to get the boys ready for public school, and then boom, the boys are 14, everybody is doing great, and a third of the movie is over.

Zac appears.

Lifetime

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In the next segment, trouble arrives in the form of the aforementioned handyman, who comes to fix Mary-Louise's flooded lawn but also ends up trying to fix the whole family. Though regular Lifetime movie viewers have been taught to remain suspicious of every man over the age of 16, Aidan's motives seem pure. He just wants to help Stephen and Phillip find their callings, and also say things like, "Am I your first ditch digger?" to their mom.

All of this is pretty standard basic-cable fare, but Zac's acting really does make it a little more interesting than you might assume such a movie would be. He doesn't rely on stereotypes to portray Stephen, and he emotes so well that you might even find yourself tearing up at points. Look at this face he makes when he finds his school crush talking to another guy at the big cross-country meet:

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Lifetime

You just want to hug him and tell him it'll all be OK, then dump a cooler of Gatorade on the crush's head!

Though Zac was only 15 or 16 when he filmed Miracle Run and the movie is as nonsexual as a movie could be (unless you count the moment Mary-Louise and Aidan touch hands while washing dishes), someone still found a way to get him shirtless on camera. He's skinny and awkward, but as one of my colleagues put it, you can tell that "the raw materials" are already there. He even kind of has abs, which I guess you're supposed to think "Stephen" got from his cross-country practices. At one point, when Stephen is lifting weights, I actually thought the movie might turn into a documentary about how Zac got so ripped. It didn't, but if anybody wants to make that documentary, you can have that idea for free.

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Lifetime

Miracle Run is by no means the best movie in Zac's filmography, but it's certainly not the worst, either — he was in New Year's Eve, after all. If you're a Zac Efron completist, it's worth watching for his faces alone. Case in point:

Lifetime

And when he wins his Oscar in 15 years, you can pretend you called it all the way back in 2004, when he was making you cry in a made-for-TV movie on Lifetime.

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